Monday, October 30, 2006

The Wills Article

by tristero

Below, Digby linked to an article by Garry Wills which details the extent the US government has been undermined by christianists with the help of the Bush administration, its ranks fully penetrated by political activists whose agenda is to establish an American theocracy. The article seems, for the most part, very good. The reason I haven't mentioned it, although I read it several days ago when my paper copy of New York Review of Books came is because there is a very unfortunate error of fact in the discussion of "intelligent design" creationism. In addition there is a minor factual error and a misleading emphasis. I alerted NY Review of these errors, and also notified a scholar of ID creationism, but the errors persist in the online version that they posted.

Wills writes

The Discovery Institute claims that it is a scientific, not a religious, enterprise, but that claim was belied when one of its internal documents was discovered. It promised that the institute would "function as a wedge...[to] split the trunk [of materialism] at its weakest points" and "replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God." The institute is mainly funded with evangelical money, and its spokespersons are evangelicals—one, Philip Johnson, says he was inspired by Unification Church founder Sun Myung Moon to "devote my life to destroying Darwinism."

1. In fact, it was not Johnson but Jonathan Wells who said that. As it happens, Wells is a "senior fellow" at the Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture (which changed its name to the Center for Science and Culture).

2. CRSC is one part of the Discovery Institute but Wills conflates DI with CRSC, as do many authors. This is not a major error. I don't know, however, if DI's money comes entirely or mainly from religious groups (and have to rush out now before I can check). CRSC, however, has, shall we say, interesting funding (see below).

3. Unfortunately, Wills actually minimized the alarming character of the people funding ID by labelling them simply "evangelicals," which encompasses everyone from Tony Campolo to Pat Robertson. In fact, much of the original funding for the marketing of "intelligent design" creationism came from none other than Howard Ahmanson, a disciple of Rousas John Rushdoony. Rushdoony, of course, is a "Christian Reconstructionist," an open advocate of replacing the American Republic with a theocracy. My source is Barbara Forrest and Paul Gross's excellent Creationism's Trojan Horse. Forrest was one of the main witnesses in the Kitzmiller case.

As far as I can tell, the other incidents Wills discussed that I've heard about are accurately portrayed.

Obviously, I'm not happy drawing attention to flaws in an article by an author I admire and the thrust of whose argument I fully agree with. But they are there and readers should know about them.tristero 10/30/2006 12:23:00 PM